Indigo Girls
Holly Happy Days

The Indigo Girls has been remarkably prolific of late. Over the past 18
months, the duo of Amy Ray and Emily Saliers not only has issued a full-length
studio set (Poseidon and the Bitter Bug) as well as a two-disc concert
collection (Staring Down the Brilliant Dream), but they also have
assembled the first holiday-focused endeavor (Holly Happy Days) of their
collaborative career. Arguably, none of these outings matches the perfection of
the Indigo Girls’ early ’90s trilogy — Rites of Passage, Swamp Ophelia,
and 1200 Curfews. Nevertheless, a case certainly could be made that the
group is fighting harder than ever to maintain its relevance.

For decades, artists have pushed Christmas-oriented albums into the
marketplace without putting much thought into them. As a result, Yuletide
offerings have earned a notoriously bad reputation. In fact, they often are
viewed as the scourge of the music business. Regardless, every year, there are
at least a few efforts that deserve more than a superficial glance. This year’s
prize just might be the Indigo Girls’ Holly Happy Days. Without a doubt,
the effort is not the typical coffer-filling collection of holiday tunes.
Instead, Saliers and Ray seem to have gone out of their way to differentiate the
affair from a lot of the other packages that are available.

Rather than filling Holly Happy Days with oft-covered selections from
the past that already have been perfected by countless other artists, the Indigo
Girls followed a different route in their bid to assemble a mixture of
contemporary and traditional tunes. Although the duo tackled a handful of
well-worn nuggets — Oh Holy Night, I’ll Be Home for Christmas, and
Angels We Have Heard on High — Saliers and Ray also discovered a fresh
perspective from which to sing them. As for the rest of the collection, it is
composed of less familiar fare that ranges from the traditional hymn Peace
Child to Woody Guthrie’sHappy Joyous Hanukkah to several original
compositions. Even a cover of Beth Nielson Chapman’s treacly There’s Still My
Joy fits neatly alongside the rest of the material.

In crafting Holly Happy Days, Saliers and Ray enlisted the help of a
few good friends — Brandi Carlile, Janis Ian, and Mary Gauthier — for vocal
support. The duo’s backing band, however, was filled with hired guns from the
roots-music scene: Alison Brown, Viktor Krauss, Lloyd Maines, Luke Bulla, and
Jim Brock. Although most of the selections retain the folk-pop gracefulness that
has become the Indigo Girls’ bread-and-butter, there also are times when the
collective opens new doors by pushing its work firmly onto bluegrass-minded
terrain. The perfect harmonies of Saliers and Ray are as well suited to the
Appalachian arrangements as they are to the regal hymns. The end result is that
Holly Happy Days is the most natural-sounding effort that the Indigo
Girls has concocted in years.